Oh, wow, hadn't had any interest in cryptonote, and after reading your link, thanks by the way, this part was especially disturbing!

NSA involvement[edit]

There are speculations about CryptoNote being developed under the guidance of NSA. Following facts are mentioned as indicating a possible connections between NSA and CryptoNote development team:[75]
Keccak hash has been chosen as a proof-of-work function in CryptoNote several months before it has been announced as SHA-3 hash function competition winner.
NSA report about electronic cash outlines the necessity of using blind signatures in order to achieve anonymity.
Using non-deterministic random in CryptoNote signatures might be a backdoor intentionally left by NSA in reference implementation.
Being ASIC-resistant, CryptoNote-based currencies can be easily manipulated by NSA possessing big computational resources.